Consider attending the African Studies Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Dennis Galvan, Vice Provost for International Affairs and Professor of Political Science, at Noon on Thursday, May 11 in the Browsing Room, Knight Library!

Dennis Galvan received his Ph.D. in Political Science from U.C. Berkeley and his B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University. Dr. Galvan centers his work on a concern for how ordinary people in the global south adaptively transform the nation-state, local government, and natural resource management systems to suit their changing and mutable notions of political morality, heritage, and identity. He has conducted comparative field research in rural Senegal since 1986, and in Central Java, Indonesia since 1999. Dr. Galvan has published numerous journal articles as well as several books, most notably, The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal.

Professor Galvan’s current book project, Everyday Nation Building, examines how ordinary people in Senegal and Indonesia creatively rework traditions of kinship and boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and national belonging. Dr. Galvan was a Fulbright scholar and has received fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the U.S. Department of Education. In 2008, he received the prestigious Thomas F. Herman Faculty Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Oregon.